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Thursday, July 31, 2014

With his track record of
bias in favor of Chevron already part of the historical record, Businessweek’s
Paul Barrett appears to have become a full-blown public advocate for the oil
giant in its legal dispute with Ecuadorian villagers over the massive
contamination of their ancestral lands.

Just this week, Barrett
testified about his take on the litigation before the House of Representatives
in a hearing that was arranged in part by Chevron
lobbyists. He appeared at the side of a lawyer from the oil giant’s
controversial outside law firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. And he repeated the usual Chevron talking
points about the Ecuador case that have been rejected by three layers of courts
in Ecuador, including that nation’s highest court in a unanimous opinion last
November.

Barrett’s testimony in
favor of Chevron – completely improper for any independent
journalist – follows multiple reports that Chevron is quietly helping to
promote his forthcoming book about the case, Law of the Jungle. We can’t say we are surprised after reviewing an
advance copy from a source who indicated Barrett is trying to flog it in
Hollywood.

The effort by Barrett to
cash in on the misery of Ecuadorian villagers by promoting Chevron’s campaign to
evade accountability is hardly surprising.
His book falls far short of fact-based responsible journalism. Barrett adopts wholesale most of Chevron’s
fraudulent plot points and ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence – most
provided by the oil company itself during an eight-year trial in the court of
its choosing in Ecuador – that was relied on to determine liability for the dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest.

(For background on the
overwhelming evidence against Chevron relied on by the Ecuador courts, see this document;
for an explanation of Chevron’s human rights abuses in Ecuador, see this video;
for how Chevron deliberately discharged toxic waste, see this 60 Minutes
segment; for a letter signed by 43 civil advocacy groups criticizing
Chevron over Ecuador, see here.)

Barrett’s obsession with
(and personal animus toward) Steven Donziger, the main U.S. legal advisor to
the villagers and the principal target of Chevron’s demonization campaign,
drips off the cover jacket and permeates almost every chapter.

Law of the Jungle suffers from some of the same egregious flaws often found in
Barrett’s reporting on the Ecuador litigation: sloppy or non-existent
research resulting in numerous factual errors; cribbing material from other
journalists and court filings; creating fictional scenes that never happened; and demonstrating a shocking disregard of the extensive scientific evidence that contradicts Chevron’s
self-serving narrative.

The book reads like a novelist’s re-purposing of
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan’s deeply flawed 487-page RICO decision,
which is currently hanging on life support during the appellate
process. Barrett’s book is as much an affront to serious journalism as Kaplan’s
decision is to serious legal reasoning.

A more comprehensive
critique of Barrett’s book is forthcoming. Here is a preview of some of its flagrant flaws:

Barrett did almost
no independent reporting. He let Chevron’s lawyers do almost all
of his work for him, effectively letting the oil giant subsidize his so-called
“independent” research. Most of the book re-writes Chevron’s court
filings and adopts almost wholesale the oil giant’s narrative that it was
“victimized” by the very indigenous groups that held it accountable.

Barrett spent
almost no time reporting on conditions in Ecuador. He never interviewed
a single member of the legal team for the villagers. He does not quote any
current Ecuadorian government officials. He never attended even a day of
the eight-year trial that resulted in a judgment against Chevron. According to
his source notes, Barrett never read the 220,000-page Ecuador trial
record. Barrett also spent no more than a few days reporting from
Ecuador, the epicenter of the two-decade legal dispute and the place Chevron's predecessor company Texaco operated for decades. The book epitomizes secondhand armchair
journalism.

Barrett’s book reads
as though the Ecuadorian people do not exist

. Consistent with
Chevron’s imperialist and arrogant behavior in Ecuador, there is virtually no
mention by Barrett of a single Ecuadorian other than Cofan indigenous leader Ermegildo Criollo, with whom he spent a few hours. In Barrett’s eyes, the people who
matter most are Americans like Donziger, Judge Kaplan, and the activists at Amazon Watch. He scarcely
mentions lead Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Fajardo (who won the CNN Hero Award for
his work on the case) and he ignores Luis Yanza (winner of the prestigious
Goldman Environmental Prize). Yanza has been the lead community advocate on the
case for over two decades. Almost none of the thousands of affected villagers
were even interviewed.

Barrett misleads
the reader about his sources. In a shocking display of poor journalistic
ethics, Barrett repeatedly misleads the reader by cribbing material without
citation from journalists who did firsthand reporting. One example: Barrett
frequently describes scenes from the award-winning documentary film Crude
without mentioning in the text that his source is the film. By so doing, Barrett
leaves the reader with the false impression he was reporting firsthand from
events that happened years ago and where he was not present. (Some of these suspect
narrative techniques seem oddly similar to what got James Frey in trouble in
his supposedly non-fiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces.)

Barrett fictionalizes events and
leaves the false impression he interviewed Donziger. Barrett asked Donziger repeatedly for
interviews for the book but Donziger refused to cooperate, acting on advice of
counsel and for other reasons related to Barrett’s lack of scruples. So Barrett now pretends that Donziger
cooperated with him anyway. Barrett
quotes Donziger from private notes turned over in discovery and relays what he
thinks is on Donziger’s mind, leaving the reader with the false impression that
he interviewed Donziger for the book or had some special access to his private
thoughts. Barrett also creates fictional
scenes involving Donziger – including one where the lawyer supposedly was
trailed by Chevron undercover operatives while riding his bike in Manhattan, which did not happen.

To create his
fictionalized story, Barrett ignores key evidence. Consistent
with Chevron’s self-serving version of events, Barrett completely ignores or distorts
key scientific evidence to try to claim that the Ecuadorians could not prove
their case. This narrative is contradicted by Chevron’s own evidence
submitted to the Ecuador court; by three layers of court decisions in Ecuador;
and by the recent analysis but a prominent group
of U.S. scientific consultants, the Louis Berger Group. He also ignores persuasive evidence
that Chevron tried to cheat during the trial to hide evidence of its
own contamination. He ignores the
fact that more than 35 scientists – including those hired by both litigants and third parties – have confirmed the oil giant’s pollution.

The book is skewed by
Barrett’s obvious personal animus toward Donziger.

Consistent with
Chevron’s strategy to “demonize” Donziger, Barrett subjects the main U.S. legal
advisor for the villagers to a host of juvenile epithets. Barrett calls Donziger a “loudmouthed
gatecrasher,” “master showman,” and describes him as a lawyer “who’d stop at
nothing” to win. He then ignores Donziger’s own narrative about what took
place in Ecuador by failing to even mention (much less cite) the attorney’s comprehensive 130-page appellate brief that exposes a good number
of Chevron’s lies, misdeeds, and unethical litigation practices. Barrett
also ignores Donziger’s own lawsuit against Chevron, which
comprehensively documents the company’s deceit in U.S. courts and its plethora
of criminal and unethical acts in Ecuador.

Perhaps more disturbingly,
we have numerous emails from the last two years or so that show Barrett becoming
unhinged over Donziger’s refusal to cooperate with his book. Many people also witnessed
a bizarre incident in open court recently where Barrett lost his cool and blew up at
Donziger’s lawyers. At times, Barrett
made explicit threats to those working for the Ecuadorians that he planned to
use his book to “take down” Donziger. He warned other lawyers they should stop working
with the New York attorney or they would risk damaging their careers.

We have long suggested that
Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel has let Barrett get away with this unprofessional
behavior for far too long. While Barrett was writing a book that is
little more than a continuation of Chevron’s hit job on Donziger, he also was
reporting “independently” for Businessweek
on Donziger’s role in the litigation.
That’s a blatant conflict of interest.
Businessweek continues to let Barrett use its web platform to promote the
themes of his flawed book and to make snarky attacks against Donziger.

All of this might explain
why Chevron’s public relations flaks are pushing Barrett’s book and
arranging for his congressional testimony.
Granted, it’s only a small part of the company’s gargantuan public
relations campaign to distract attention from its ecological calamity in the
Amazon. But we have seen how Chevron has convinced other formerly
reputable advocates, such as human rights academic Douglas Cassel, to take up arms for a
corporate polluter in exchange for money. Cassel has so damaged his reputation that
his faculty colleagues at Notre Dame ordered his diatribes about the Ecuador case
removed from the law school’s official website.

Barrett is the latest bit
player to try to boost his profile and make a buck off of Chevron’s
billion-dollar retaliation campaign against the Ecuadorian villagers. The company’s strategy to “demonize" Donziger – outlined explicitly in internal Chevron emails dating back five years – is now a
cottage industry that includes no fewer than 60 outside law firms, 2,000 legal
personnel, ten investigations firms, at least six public relations firms, and
now Barrett. It has to be the most
robustly financed corporate retaliation campaign in history.

While Barrett hustles his
book, the indigenous people of Ecuador continue to suffer. This is partly because a
compromised American “journalist” has now made it a little bit easier for Chevron’s
management team to evade its court-mandated responsibilities to the people it harmed.

Businessweek’s readers and
the public deserve better.
So do the affected communities in Ecuador.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Chevron’s New York RICO lawsuit is fast going from shock
and awe to doom and gloom.

Legal briefs filed this month before a New York federal
appeals court appear to dismantle the very foundation of the shameful
Chevron-financed “racketeering” show trial that went down in late 2013 in the courtroom
of controversial federal judge Lewis A. Kaplan. By reading the briefs – which are summarized
below-- one can gain even more insight into what might have been one of the
most abusive trials in recent memory.

What comes through loud and clear is that presiding
Judge Kaplan essentially turned over his federal courtroom to a gigantic oil company
so some of its
2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms could have a jolly good time billing huge
fees to beat up on impoverished Ecuadorian villagers and their U.S. lawyer, solo
practitioner Steven Donziger.Donziger,
who for years has worked out of his apartment in Manhattan to hold Chevron
accountable for its human rights crimes in Ecuador, is the lead target of what
is probably the most well-financed corporation retaliation campaign in history.

During the RICO trial– attended daily by Chevron’s $7
million-per-year General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate – Kaplan excluded almost all
evidence that would have contradicted Chevron’s fake
narrative that it was the victim of the very indigenous groups it poisoned.
Kaplan not only denied the defendants a jury of impartial fact finders, he excluded
the overwhelming scientific evidence of Chevron’s contamination in Ecuador and
generally behaved as an overwrought prosecutor for the oil company.

The key takeaway from the briefs is that Kaplan never
had the legal right to let the case proceed in the first place.This is why we repeatedly have called the
RICO proceeding a show trial designed to produce bogus “factual findings” to help
Chevron evade enforcement of the Ecuador judgment in foreign jurisdictions.It bears noting that in 2011, Kaplan was unanimously
reversed after he tried to impose an unprecedented injunction purporting to
block the Ecuadorian villagers from enforcing their judgment anywhere in the
world.

Except in rare circumstances not present here, both U.S. law and international law prohibit one country’s
courts from trying to rule on another country's final judicial decisions. This is exactly what the hyper-excited Kaplan
purported to do in March is in his bloated 487-page RICO opinion, which reads more
like spin from an oil industry talking head than sound legal reasoning. Having made up his mind, Kaplan clearly started writing his magnum opus even before the trial started or the
evidence came in.

It is even more clear from the appellate briefs that Kaplan's findings are based on a stinky stew of Chevron lies, distortions, and the judge's obvious ignorance of the law of a foreign nation whose language he does
not speak. Kaplan did
not read the 220,000-page Ecuador trial record, the 188-page trial judgment against
Chevron, or the country's civil code. Nor did he see any of the contaminated sites with his own eyes.Yet Kaplan decided from his Manhattan courtroom that he knows better how to apply
Ecuadorian law than the courts of Ecuador.

As Deepak Gupta, Donziger’s appellate lawyer wrote, it
would be hard to find a more extreme example of American “judicial imperialism”
that Kaplan's handiwork in this case.

Kaplan thought he was clever to reverse-engineer the
trial in Chevron’s favor by excluding key evidence.But the briefs, which confirm what we have
been saying all along about Kaplan’s intellectual
dishonesty as a jurist, show him (at least in this case) to be the
trickster that he is.

You heard it here first: after reading these briefs, it is simply inconceivable that Kaplan’s decision
survives appeal.Those journalists
who for years have been shamelessly cheerleading the Chevron/Kaplan sideshow – we
are thinking mostly of Business Week’s Paul Barrett, Michael Goldhaber of
American Lawyer Media, and the once-esteemed Roger Parloff of Fortune who
refuses to even print our responses challenging his
misleading reporting – better inch back off the Chevron limb if they want
to retain even of smidgeon of credibility going forward.

Consider the contents of some of the submissions to
the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from the principal defendants and their
supporters, who filed “friend of the court” or amicus briefs:

New York
Lawyer Steven Donziger:Donziger, the main target of Chevron’s
retaliation campaign, explains in his fact section how the company pays the
investigations company Kroll to spy on adversary counsel – including himself
and his family.The brief exposes the
dirty tricks used by Kaplan and Chevron’s lawyers to try to prejudice him at
every turn – from presenting misleading film outtakes, to ordering him to turn
over his entire privileged case file, to forcing him to sit for an American record 19 days
of sworn depositions. He also points out how Kaplan let Chevron use a clearly corrupted witness bribed with more than $1
million of company money to falsely claim Donziger bribed a judge. The brief demonstrates how Kaplan denied the
defendants their right to a jury; how he never had jurisdiction; how he let
Chevron unlawfully use the RICO statute to attack lawyers; and how he simply
made up out of whole cloth – after
the trial -- a common law fraud claim that Chevron never even asserted as part
of a preposterous effort to salvage the company’s weakened legal position.The brief also points to internal company
emails to demonstrate how Chevron mounted a campaign to “demonize” Donziger and
ruin his reputation, of which the RICO case was a central feature.

Donziger’s brief, prepared by rising appellate star
Gupta of Gupta Beck and John Campbell and Justin Marceau, two young law
professors at the University of Denver, can be read here.

Ecuadorian
villagers:Javier Piaguaje and Hugo Camacho, the two
Ecuadorians who appeared in the RICO case (45 others rejected Kaplan’s
jurisdiction), pointed out that Kaplan did not understand some of the basic differencse
between a civil law system used in Latin America and the common law system of
the U.S.As a result, Kaplan spent his 487 pages attacking the wrong judgment – the one from
the trial level, rather than the de novo appellate court judgment that was
unanimously affirmed by Ecuador’s Supreme Court and is the only relevant decision at this point in the case. A copy of the brief, prepared pro bono by noted law scholar Burt
Neuborne from New York University, can be read here.

International
law scholars:More than 35 prominent international law
experts from 11 countries – including Australia, Austria, Spain, the U.S., and
Israel – submitted an amicus brief that explains the many ways that Kaplan’s decision violates
international law.The scholars accused
Kaplan of trying to unlawfully “dictate” to judges in other countries how they
should rule on the enforceability of the Ecuador judgment, in direct
contravention of the sovereignty of those countries and U.S. domestic law.That brief can be read here;
a press release about it is here.

U.S. civil society organizations:Several prominent U.S.-based non-profit
organizations -- including Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, and
Amazon Watch – lambasted Kaplan for letting Chevronuse the RICO statute as a weapon to trample
on the First Amendment rights of the numerous critics of the company’s Ecuador environmental
disaster.The brief persuasively
demonstrates that Chevron used the RICO case as a SLAPP suit designed to harass
and silence its critics, in violation of the Constitution.They also point out that Kaplan, in a clear
case of reversible error, never even considered the First Amendment
implications of the defendants and their supporters before deciding the
case.That brief can be read here.

Government
of Ecuador:In urging reversal of the RICO decision, the
government of Ecuador directs fire at Kaplan’s unprecedented frontal attack
on the judiciary of a democratic nation, U.S. ally, and commercial trading
partner.The brief points out that Kaplan’s
“finding” that Ecuador’s entire judicial system falls below international
standards was based largely on the discredited testimony of Dr. Alvaro Grau, an
Ecuadorian politician who is an opponent of the current President of Ecuador
and who formed his conclusions based on newspapers stories from the opposition
press.The government also points out that Chevron
repeatedly had praised Ecuador’s court system in the 1990s to transfer the
matter from U.S. federal court (where it was originally filed in 1993) to the
South American nation, and therefore should be prohibited now from complaining
about Ecuador’s courts.Only when the
scientific evidence of toxic pollution began to mount against Chevron did the
company switch gears and begin to attack Ecuador’s courts in a clear case of
sour grapes, argued the government.The
brief, prepared by the American law firm Winston & Strawn, can be read here.

Earth Rights
International:This brief, filed by one of our nation’s most
prominent environmental and human rights legal organizations, urges reversal on
the grounds that Chevron agreed to submit to jurisdiction in Ecuador and therefore
should be bound by the rulings of its courts.For more on this brief, read here.

As compelling as they are, these briefs capture only a
portion of Kaplan’s abuse.For example,
there is no mention of how Kaplan let Chevron pay 100% of the legal fees of his
former law partner Max Gitter to serve as “Special Master” during the discovery
phase of the RICO trial, but then let Gitter hide his actual invoices from
Donziger and the Ecuadorians. Chevron surely paid Gitter millions of dollars, but due to Kaplan the amount remains a secret. Whatever the amount, this back-slapping relationship between a supposedly neutral jurist and Chevron is ugly. And it helps explain why Gitter repeatedly ruled
in favor of Chevron and ordered the wholesale disclosure of Donziger's privileged documents, while blocking Donziger from getting almost all of Chevron's documents.See this
analysis for more background on Gitter's biased behavior.

We have come a long way from the “shock and awe” days
in 2010 when Chevron claimed every new piece of discovery was somehow
proof of the “fraud” that never was.Chevron
CEO John Watson and Pate launched discovery suits in more than 20 federal
courts to try to intimidate the villagers and their allies.The Cabrera damages report ended up being a
non-issue, as the Ecuador court refused to consider it; in any event Donziger and
several prominent Ecuadorian law scholars stand by it.The video outtakes of Donziger criticizing Ecuador’s courts are not relevant, and in any event they were manipulated
by Chevron to try to taint Donziger’s image and mislead courts throughout the country. And we now know that the real bribery in the case was
Chevron’s -- of its star witness, crooked former judge Alberto Guerra.

It can’t be fun for Watson and Pate to go from shock
and awe to doom and gloom, but that indeed is what has happened. The RICO games don't much matter given that foreign courts are not bound by anything Kaplan orders, and it is likely he will be reversed yet again. But the meltdown sure is interesting to watch.

Desperate to protect its favorite judge, Chevron has
retained former Solicitor General Theodore Olsen to argue its case before the
Second Circuit.As we pointed out before,
not even the great Supreme Court orator and now
ersatz filmmaker is capable of putting lipstick on Chevron’s pig.

Once the appellate court rules, Chevron likely will
have lost not only in the courts of its chosen forum of Ecuador, but also in the
U.S. where it enjoyed a home field advantage.At that point, enforcement actions targeting billions of dollars of Chevron
assets (and currently pending in Canada and Brazil) will be given a huge boost.

In the meantime, the human consequences of Kaplan's folly grow more acute.Because Kaplan
essentially gave Chevron’s management a false sense of confidence, thousands of
rainforest villagers now have to put up with life-threatening levels of
contamination on their ancestral lands for years longer.Ultimately, the responsibility lies at the
foot of Chevron CEO and Chairman Watson and the notoriously passive members of the company’s
Board.These mostly pale people of
privilege, who collect huge fees for serving largely as “yes men” to company management, have done nothing
to try to ameliorate a humanitarian disaster created on their watch.

Lance Ito let the O.J. case spiral out of control
because of his failure to manage the proceedings.What is most disturbing from the new briefs
is how Kaplan so clearly orchestrated the entire process, even indicating to
Chevron’s lawyers how they should present evidence, how they should modify
their claims, and what he needed (wink wink) to best put the screws to
Donziger, against whom he had a clear personal vendetta.(See these
briefs here
and here
for Kaplan’s disparaging and inappropriate comments about Donziger and his
clients.)

The final death spasms of this sordid chapter in U.S.
legal history are in motion. Kudos to
the excellent appellate lawyers who are fighting on, despite Chevron’s pressure
campaign.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

They
are Chevron scientific consultants who tried to defraud Ecuador’s courts with
trickery and flat-out lies. Their dishonest work likely will be viewed
with great interest in foreign courts that are looking to seize Chevron assets
to pay for the company's liability in Ecuador.

We
practically fell off our chair when we read the details of this group's
subterfuge in a recent court filing (see pp. 33-85 of this legal brief).
Chevron is certainly creative when it comes to cheating.

None
of this should come as a surprise.

We
recently reported that a new study
by a prominent U.S. scientific consultancy (the Louis Berger Group) yet again
confirms that Chevron is responsible for discharging billions of gallons of
toxic “water of formation” into the streams and rivers of the rainforest in
order to artificially inflate its profits. The consultancy also confirmed
the gritty details of how Chevron tried to trick judges during the Ecuador
trial, which concluded in 2011 with a stunning judgment against the company.

We
note that Chevron’s trickery is on top of the company's intimidatin campaign
-- including efforts to threaten
Ecuador’s judges with jail time and to paralyze the court by
drowning it with frivolous motions.

The
deceptions deployed by McMillan (who is Chevron’s chief scientist) and tainted consultant John
Conner have
come to light in a legal brief filed by Ecuador’s government in its arbitration
dispute with Chevron. The American law firm Winston & Strawn (which
represents Ecuador) quietly has been forcing Chevron to disclose documents that
prove the company tried to corrupt the Ecuador trial.

Examples
of Chevron’s tricks as described by Winston & Strawn include:

**
Conner wrote a playbook
directing the company’s field technicians to find only “clean” soil during the
judicial inspections by sampling in areas up-gradient from visibly contaminated
waste pits. Chevron’s technicians then tried to act like they were
engaging in “random” sampling in front of the judge.

**As
confirmed by Bjorkman, Chevron conducted secret pre-inspections of several of
the company’s former well sites where it found numerous dirty soil samples that
far exceeded Ecuadorian regulatory norms. Rather than report these
samples to the court, the company hid the results.

(This
critical data as well as the evidence of Chevron's corruption was not reviewed
by U.S. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan is his tainted and
farcical RICO trial against the Ecuadorians and their counsel.
This evidence will be reviewed by enforcement courts that are being asked
to seize Chevron’s assets to force the company to comply with the Ecuador
judgment.)

**Chevron’s
Ecuadorian lawyers -- led by the notorious Adolfo Callejas -- lied to
the Ecuador court by claiming the company never performed the tests during
its secret pre-inspections. (See p. 65 of the aforementioned legal brief.)

**During
the official judicial inspections (when the judge was present), Chevron tried
to take soil samples from the shallow surface layer of dirt that it used to
cover its oil waste pits during a sham remediation
in the mid-1990s. Yet data showed that several feet below where Chevron
was sampling, the waste pits were saturated with oil that was contaminating
soils and groundwater.

**A
Chevron operative, Diego Borja, confessed on tape that he would often switch
dirty samples for clean ones before submitting them to laboratories for
analysis. He also confessed that the company set up dummy “independent”
labs that actually were controlled by Chevron. For more on Borja
and his corrupt activities, see here.

**McMillan’s
team also mixed dirty soil with clean soil from the same site so as to
artificially lower the average of the contamination found.

**Chevron
never tested for key markers of oil contamination, such as Total Petroleum
Hydrocarbons. Instead, it tested for more narrow constituent elements
that made the contamination appear less extensive than it really was.

**Chevron
used two inappropriate laboratory tests (TCLP and Method 8015) that made it
virtually impossible
to detect illegal levels of contamination, even from oil-saturated soil.
Method 8015 counts only 50% of the hydrocarbons in petroleum, while the
TCLP test often captures less than 1% of the actual contamination.

(The
TCLP test runs water over soils contaminated with hydrocarbons, and measures
the amount of hydrocarbons in the runoff. Because water and oil don’t
mix, the runoff contains almost none of the oil in the soil.)

**Chevron’s
team also refused to test for an extremely toxic class of Polycyclic Aromatic
Hydrocarbons that are harmful to human health -- apparently knowing that such
tests would point to its guilt.

**Chevron
blamed high cancer rates and other health problems on the presence of fecal
matter even though there is no scientific evidence connecting fecal matter with
cancer. The high rates of
cancerand
risks to human
healthhave
been confirmed
in several peer-reviewed studies by independent doctors.

The
legal brief captured the company’s subterfuge:

Chevron
has expended tremendous sums on expensive experts, laboratories, and
technology. Armed with its deep resources, Chevron systematically and
deliberately devoted time and money to detect where contamination exists and
where it does not. Chevron then systematically did everything in its
power to avoid sampling at the most contaminated locations, thereby seeking to
minimize its findings of contamination, all the while contending that its
anything-but-random samples [during the official judicial inspections] were
“representative” of the whole. They were not.

We
admire the restraint of the writer. It’s not often one can clinically
describe an outright fraud by an American oil company designed to hide one of
the world’s worst ecological catastrophes.

Despite
the trickery, Chevron still submitted enough soil samples to the Ecuador court
from the official inspections to prove the claims against it. This
underscores just how saturated with oil waste Chevron's facilities are years
after it fled the country.

Incredibly,
additional proof of Chevron’s deceit was captured by the oil company itself on
videos it made of its secret pre-inspections.

Chevron’s
video outtakes – which the company has asked courts to seal – show field
technicians laughing at the contamination and mocking the Ecuador court
process. A Chevron whistleblower turned them over to a U.S.-based
environmental organization. It is highly doubtful the company can keep
them under wraps forever.

As
we have reported, the LBG report validates the decisions of three layers of
courts in Ecuador that found the company liable and imposed the damages
award. The amount ($9.5 billion) surely must sting in the Chevron
boardroom. But it is actually a modest penalty taking into account the venality
of the company’s misconduct and the magnitude of the damage. BP’s
liability is three times higher (and rising) for the far smaller Deepwater
Horizon spill.

Chevron
of course admitted to
deliberately dumping at least 16 billion gallons of oil-laced produced
water when it operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. The company also
abandoned more than 900 unlined waste pits gouged out of the jungle
floor. Cancer rates in the region, where an estimated 200,000 people
live, have skyrocketed.

We
note that McMillan, Conner, and Bjorkman are not the only “academics” willing
to sell their integrity to Chevron for money and make themselves complict in
human rights abuses. The company also has submitted to courts reports
from Douglas
Southgate, who is associated with a think tank that denies
conventional theories about global warming; and the infamous Ralph Marquez,
formerly the lead lobbyist for the chemical industry in the state of Texas and
a Chevron consultant.

When
Chevron management decides to do business with dogs like this, everybody associated
with the company gets fleas. No reputable academic would even think of working under McMillan, whose entire purpose is to obfuscate the truth and to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific evidence of the company's crimes.